Americans are increasingly trapped by the Obama administration’s bureaucratic red tape, and it’s costing the economy billions of dollars, according to two new reports from right-leaning think tanks.

In 2014, the US executive branch added 27 new
“prescriptive” major rules, bringing the
administration’s total to 184 major regulations during President
Barack Obama’s term-and-a-half in the White House, the Heritage
Foundation revealed in a
new study on the rise of red tape under Obama.

Regulations are deemed “major” or “economically
significant” when they are expected to cost the economy $100
million or more annually, the study’s authors, James L. Gattuso
and Diane Katz noted. “Prescriptive” rules increase
burdens on individual or private-sector activity.

The 184 prescriptive rules introduced by the Obama administration
since 2009 is estimated to be nearly $80 billion a year,
“although the actual cost of this massive expansion of the
administrative state is obscured by the large number of rules for
which costs have not been fully quantified,” they wrote.

"This appears to be unparalleled with any prior
administration, and that total dollar figure is from about 184
major rules," Katz told OneNewsNow.com. "Now, I caution
that that $80 billion figure is a pretty low estimate because the
administration has failed in many rules to actually calculate the
cost as they're supposed to do."

There are still an additional 126 economically federal rules and
regulations in the pipeline, such as “directives to farmers
for growing and harvesting fruits and vegetables; strict limits
on credit access for service members; and, yet another redesign
of light bulbs,” Gattuso and Katz wrote.

The authors looked through the Government Accountability Office’s
Federal Rules Database , and discovered that the Obama
administration has issued twice as many major, prescriptive rules
in its first six years as the 76 that George W. Bush
administration did during the same time period. The costs of
Obama’s regulations ‒ an estimated $7.4 billion ‒ were cheaper
than Bush’s ‒ about $8.9 billion ‒ but they noted that the cost
calculations were incomplete for a dozen of the rules created in
2014. On top of the annual costs, there were also one-time
implementation costs for the federal regulations, bringing the
Obama administration’s total bill to $17 billion.

The Dodd-Frank Act, which regulates securities and the banking
system, and the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obamacare,
were the biggest reasons for the increasing red tape coming out
of Washington, DC, according to Gattuso and Katz.

The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) took a different
approach to study the federal regulatory state. The libertarian
think tank’s annual “Ten Thousand Commandments” report surveys
the size, scope and cost of federal regulation, as well as how
the federal government affects US consumers, businesses and the
overall economy.

The CEI report “shines a light on the large, growing 'hidden
tax' of America’s regulatory state,” the think tank said in
a statement. It added up
what the regulations cost the US in terms of economic
productivity and higher prices, which totaled an estimated $1.88
trillion in 2014, or 11 percent of the US gross domestic product
of $17.4 trillion.

“If it were a country, US regulation would be the world’s
tenth-largest economy, ranking behind Russia and ahead of
India,” CEI Vice President for Policy Wayne Crews, the
author of the study,
wrote.

The costs were significant on American households, too, which
shelled out nearly $15,000 last year ‒ or about 29 percent of the
average family’s budget of $51,100 ‒ due to federal regulations.

These rules come about after Congress passes laws, leaving the
details up to the various federal administrations, which then
create the regulations. Crews believes that the legislative
branch should require expedited votes on economically significant
or controversial rules before they go into effect, creating a
principle of “no regulations without representation.”

"Congressional rather than agency approval of regulations and
regulatory costs should be the goal of reform. When Congress
ensures transparency and disclosure and finally assumes
responsibility for the growth of the regulatory state, the
resulting system will be one that is fairer and more accountable
to voters," Crews wrote in the report.